Boost Test Resilience with Selenium IDE 4’s Multi‑Locator and Control‑Flow Features

In automated UI testing, test cases that passed in a previous software version may fail after an update, often due to changes in UI code that break existing web element locators.

Selenium IDE 4 addresses this fragility by recording multiple locators for each element. During playback, if the primary locator cannot be found, the IDE sequentially tries alternative locators until one succeeds, improving test resilience.

The article includes a demo showing how Selenium IDE captures both CSS‑based locators and the Click command’s XPath expression or other strategies, enabling flexible element identification.

Support for Loops and Conditional Logic

Selenium IDE 4 also introduces control‑flow commands that let testers execute commands only when certain conditions are met, or repeat a set of commands multiple times. This is useful for handling pop‑ups, cookie consent dialogs, or other runtime interactions.

Key control‑flow commands include:

if, else if, else, end

times, end

do, repeat if

while, end

An example of a conditional branch is shown in the following screenshot.

The example also demonstrates that besides the execute script command, many other commands such as command can be used, often with JavaScript code to extend test logic.